close your eyes and hope for the best

Black-tipped Reef Shark. Long Island Bahamas. (click image to enlarge)

We fear the unknown and bring down cages where we become the caged animal. Over time we have learned that there is little to fear. We really don’t need those cages.

The Ankle Biter
Sometimes, if we had dived one location too many times in a row, towards the end of a dive the sharks would become satiated or uninterested in the bait bucket. I remember one dive in particular when the cinematographers, John and Adam, had dumped some of the chopped up fish on the reef to get the sharks to come in closer. After a short time John and Adam moved a few feet away to get a slightly different shot.

I had already finished my roll or two of film. Armed with my trusty stainless steel pole I was keeping an eye on the action while floating a few inches above the coral. For some unknown reason one of the smaller sharks kept swimming aggressively towards my ankles. It was very persistent.

John’s words rang through my mind, “If a shark is giving you trouble you just give it a good stiff poke with that steel rod”. (See part I).
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Black-tipped Reef Shark. Long Island Bahamas. (click image to enlarge)

One by one, a parade of Atlantic Black-tipped Reef Sharks glided by. They were elegant. Perfect in every way.

It was a dream job. I was an underwater stills photographer on a made for television underwater documentary series. The primary function of my job was to photograph the crew while they were filming wildlife, or shipwrecks, or whatever else they happened to be shooting. We spent months at a time on locations in Florida, various locales in the Caribbean and throughout the Great Lakes. My first shark dive is one of those life moments that remain crystal clear in memory.

When filming or photographing sharks in the wild, most of the time the sharks are baited in. For most species of sharks the divers do not require shark cages but rather stay in the open, preferably very close to the bait.

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Bill Frymire’s golden Tabby Cat (click image to enlarge)

this shot of Mocha is one of my better selling stock images…
even though she has turned all of our wooden furniture into her personal scratching posts, she has more than paid for them…

In keeping with the pet theme, I thought you would like to meet the house cat who put an end to our pet goldfish. Her name is Mocha. She’s not really mocha coloured, but according to our kids, she gets her name from the “M” marking above her eyebrows. Actually, judging from the fatty paunch she is covering up, the golden arches of McDonalds seem more appropriate. After scratching at the screen window, her belly swings and bounces to and fro when she trots in and makes a bee-line for her catfood, only occasionally venturing off course to water and fertilize our houseplants.

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